I Matched With My High School Crush on Hometown Tinder and This Is What Happened

It's probably not cool to admit this, but I straight-up paid for Tinder Plus just to give myself a leg up on the hometown Tinder game during the holidays. A week before Christmas, I set my location to just 7 miles within my Connecticut hometown, pretty much stopping short of rubbing my hands together with glee.

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Why was I so excited for hometown Tinder? Like most successful young women, I went through high school relatively unnoticed. Ignored, even! Growing up Asian in a Connecticut town that was nearly 97 percent white (it's true, Wiki said so) was not fun. I was never as smart as my other Asian contemporaries (TBT to my three-digit SAT score!) and I also wanted to be white so badly. I'm pretty sure the other white kids could smell the desperation on me, like the Hollister perfume I begged my mom to buy so I could pretend to be a carefree, freckled surfer girl and not 14 years old and waiting for the school bus in the snow.

I had no friends. Not the way that everyone claims to have no friends in high school, but then somehow manages to stay in touch with five or six hometown people all throughout college. When I go back to Connecticut, my schedule is never full of "catching up" with old friends, but staying in my house with my dog and playing Nancy Drew PC games and my dad yelling at me for turning the heater up past 67 degrees.

I suspect that being one of a handful of Asian girls did not help my cause. Boys in class would ask me if my vagina was slanted like my eyes (Which, what the fuck? This logic fails me to this day). I was surrounded by rich white girls with horses and all I could notice was how my eyelashes pointed straight down and didn't naturally curl upward like white girls'. How my calves were so much thicker than my classmates' — even though I was still bony everywhere else. Where my classmates had aquiline noses and defined jaw lines, I had protruding eyeballs hidden poorly behind a layer of droopy eyelid tissue and a soft chin that seemed to melt into my earlobes.

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Since dating did not seem to be in the cards for me (I did not have a boyfriend in high school, ever), I settled for the next best thing: being single. Luckily I had one source of inspiration in my life: Limited cable access reruns of Sex and the City and Gossip Girl. I yearned to have a bedazzled sidekick phone and ~drama~ at my Upper East Side private school, but I also wanted to be 35 and a chain-smoking freelance writer opening up TextEdit in my undies in the middle of the day. Naturally, what better way to live my truth than to move a whole two hours away to New York City and study fashion?

Claudia Arisso

I wasn't wrong! Almost immediately after graduating and moving, I could feel my stock rising in the world. I met other kindred spirits who also cared about fashion as much as I did. Back home, boys would ask me why I dressed like "a 40-year-old businesswoman" — and by the way, I'm not sorry I leaned the fuck in to, like, one high-waisted skirt in 2009. I met people who made me laugh and who wanted to hang out with me as much as I did with them. I started a fashion blog and attended Fashion Week, got paid to sit in the front row, and received free clothes in exchange for posting about them on social media. The real world treated me like my opinion actually mattered, but I was still looking over my shoulder to make sure the people from my past saw too. Bless up.

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So I've always had a complex about needing people back home to know I've done OK for myself, but the thing that really threw things into gear happened a few months ago. I was hooking up with an old high school classmate. We met over Bumble, a euphemistically named feminist version of Tinder where the woman has to message the guy first. He was a year older than me and now lived in the city, working in a similar field. He obviously did not remember me, but I remembered that his girlfriend back in the halcyon days of 2009 had been Asian and I was sold. I thanked God for this ally of a white guy who was woke enough to probably sleep with another Asian girl. We bonded over our appreciation of dank memes and hooked up for a few weeks. One night, he asked me if I thought I had been hot in high school.

"What the fuck does that mean?" Low-key, I had never felt so disrespected in my life. It was the humiliating equivalent of spending two hours doing your makeup for a night out, managing to get both your eyeliner wings to match, and your false eyelashes to go on pretty easily on your first try — only to discover four hours later in the bathroom that your left falsie has detached from the corner of your eye and has been off getting high by the beach THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME YOU WERE TALKING TO THAT CUTE GUY AT THE BAR BEFORE. The feeling that everyone can see your fuckup but you've been cruising at the bar all night completely fucking unaware and thinking that you've fooled everyone into believing your eyelashes are really this long, that you're really so confident now that you don't give a fuck about high school.

"Well, did you think you were hot in high school? I'm just asking because I mentioned your name to a friend of mine and he said he didn't remember you but that you were maybe hot?"

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"Well, I don't know," I sputtered. Obviously I wanted to say yes, but I also wanted to die a little.

Here I was, ably cultivating my cool-girl life in the big city, and this fucker had the audacity to bring me back down? At best, the reminder that he and his friends didn't remember me at all made me feel shitty. At worst, what? I should've answered, "No, I thought I was a pig and now thanks to the magic of time, contouring, and running some strategic CS6 on my nudes, I stand here before you all glo'd up"? "Thank you for finding it in the kindness of your heart to let me near you?"

I'll show him, I thought, throwing my Sailor Moon costume and riding crop into my work bag the next morning. If I could match with one guy who thought he was better than me in high school, I bet I could easily get five to eight more white guys like him from our high school of 1,200 to disrespect me too.

I mean, fuck, I knew that I'd exceeded all expectations of myself in high school already. That coupled with the fact that the standards were just so unbearably low to begin with felt like I had it in the bag.

I was also armed with the most important lesson learned in four years at college in New York. White guys love Asian girls. Years of gentleman catcallers had taught me well. God bless the subway masturbator who loved me — even when I didn't deserve it — who made sure I knew I was a "beautiful China doll" whose only true fault was to "smile, [more often] bitch." Gone were my youthful insecurities about my eyelashes and my jawline. I could've worn a SARS mask in all my photos and the odds of me peeling a Nike mid-calf sock from the floor of my mom's Prius later that weekend would've been the same.

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Obviously, I am well aware of how sad it may seem to use other people's approval as a measuring stick for success. But there's no better feeling than when girls who were bitchy to you at the lunch table now quietly start liking your Facebook or Instagram updates years later. For the guys who ignored your existence as an awkward 16-year-old, the approval feels just as good. I was looking for validation and acceptance on hometown Tinder. Seeing that I had matched with someone who had ignored me growing up would have felt like the ultimate flex.

Nov. 5, 2015. The day I earned my Congressional Medal of Honor for bravely taking the plunge and making the most important investment of my dating life thus far: paying $9.99 for a month of Tinder Plus, the premium version of Tinder that allows users to remotely swipe from other locations. Great for horny traveling businessmen or attention-starved 22-year-old girls looking to get a feeler for what it's like to be the object of hometown thirst while home for the holidays.

I made sure to #optimize my profile according to best practices too. As a Social Media Professional, I know a thing or two about how to get the best engagement on social media. I picked the photos I thought could best fit a fuckable-anime-character fantasy. Aesthetic: Notice me Senpai :) I also added in a really witty line in my bio inviting guys to "slide into my DMs if u wanna MegaVideo n chill." This ensured any potential suitors that I was (1) down, (2) Not Like Other Girls Haha Chill™. I packed my dignity a lunch and sent her on her way as I opened my age restrictions to 20 to 50+ because damnit, this wasn't a joke.

The thirst trap was set. Now all that was left to do was wait.

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I rode the MetroNorth train back to my parents' house, dramatically peering out the window and squinting into the distance occasionally, a grounding exercise that makes me think of the heroes who have walked this path before me: namely Serena Van Der Woodsen returning from rehab on the very same train line during the first episode of Gossip Girl. I ate dinner with my parents normally and promised myself I wouldn't check the trap until the time was right. The real Fuckboy Hour. One a.m.

As the clock struck 12:59, I almost choked on my night cheese, I was so excited. I very ceremoniously shut down my game of Nancy Drew and started swiping in my childhood bedroom. With only my adolescent "Keep Calm & Carry On" poster judging me, I swiped right with abandon. Any person with more than 10 mutual friends was fair game.

Claudia Arisso

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Seeing the first familiar face was strange. Eventually, however, I began to expect seeing familiar high school classmates in the deck — my heart rate would noticeably jump when I was expecting a familiar face, only for it to be some random Wesleyan student. Gnawing down the back of my retainer atop my Costcopedic bed, I swiped until 3 a.m. Everything about it was addictive. The instant gratification of seeing classmates immediately match with me, refreshing the app to see if I had any new matches, everything felt like a possibility.

Conversations with old classmates varied. One guy I had class with for four years seemed genuinely interested in saying hi and catching up. That was nice! Another guy prefaced things by openly calling out how awkward it was to match on Tinder and then gave me his phone number. It was a very persuasive half-neg. I honestly would have texted him but he mentioned going to a bar for drinks and I'm scared of driving.

I matched with two other ~popular~ boys who never would have noticed me in school. After these two guys noticed I had copied and pasted the same boilerplate "Hey did we go to hs together?" message to the both of them, they sent me identical messages back — even down to the same exact time and punctuation. At first I was surprised that LegalZoom was in on the Tinder market, but then I realized they were probably in the same room trolling me, which honestly seems gratuitous and a little cruel considering they already knew they were too cool for me. One of the guys even unmatched me afterward. Because I am strong, I only let myself shed a single tear over what could've been.

The most exciting match of all, though, was with a guy I had a crush on senior year. This guy had it made. I actually don't know if any of this is true, but I feel like he probably has a fuckton of boat shoes and a golden retriever. We took AP Lit together and he didn't give a fuck about me in a way that makes me still interested to this day. He ended up going to college in the city too and we met up a few times, but nothing ever happened.

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Since the worst thing that can happen on hometown Tinder is misinterpreting a friendly ha-ha-so-funny-to-see-you-on-here right-swipe as an organic yeah-I'm-actually-DTF-swipe, I had to cover all my bases. Just to make sure that his swipe was not an accident (or us matching on Bumble, or us matching on Tinder two years prior to me resetting my account), I reached out with that same "did we go to high-school together" line.

"Nah I don't think so. I think I went to high school with a girl named carina, but I don't think she was the same person. *~*Deep*~*" (Tildes and all!)

"Omg that's beautiful," I responded.

I asked him if he had blessed me with an organic swipe, and after he said yes, I went for the jugular: asking if he wanted to meet up "for coffee or drinks haha :)".

He did not respond. I was crushed. I agonized over the message I sent him. Was I not chill enough? Did I come on too strong? Not strong enough? Was it the smiley face that did me in? It was the smiley face that did me in. I immediately closed out of the app and refused to look at it for the remainder of my trip. The shame was so paralyzing. I was a zombie until I left for New York again.

Nomi Ellenson | Claudia Arisso

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When I returned to the city, I asked Hometown Bumble Bro if he would ever want to exclusively date me. I'd developed a crush on him sometime around the 15th time we slept together, as one sometimes does in this hellish backward landscape of hookup culture. "Nah," he replied. "I like hooking up with you, but I think I wanna date other girls." The scenery was different, but I felt the same way I did at 16 — only instead of being let down in a dumpy Connecticut parking lot, this time I was at the juice bar of the very poppin' Union Square Whole Foods.

That night I fixated on cringey feelings of insecurity that had atrophied while I was away at college. I don't have a diary because I'm a slob who loses every material possession ever, but if I did, I totally would have written in one about how gross I felt. It wasn't sadness or heartbreak, but mostly embarrassment. On paper, I did have it all. A cool job, a cool apartment, enough social media friends that I don't feel bad about only having a handful of IRL friends, but still, why was I so fucked up over not getting my revenge fantasy neatly and instantly delivered to my greedy Millennial hands like some sort of emotional Amazon Prime order?

I reminded myself to take the Instagram panorama view of the situation. I get a lot more matches in New York than in Connecticut. Guys here will SuperLike me and actually start conversation with me, instead of my high school classmates who will only regs like me and then sit silently in my "recent matches" tray till we both fucking turn to dust.

Yeah, the backstory of some guy thinking he's too good for me for four years first and then matching with me is pretty sexy for my ego, but is that temporary high really worth opening the door for ghosts of fuckboys past? Just as surely as there will always be a guy from Connecticut in a Patagonia fleece who doesn't give a fuck about me, there might also be nice, interesting men with whom I can have a real connection.

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In the meantime, I have my friends. The other night, I wound up at a diner with one, where I asked her if I was being stupid about my high-school complex while we drunkenly stabbed at our 3 a.m. pancakes. "Dude, the high school complex is so fucking real," she said. "It's why I fucked the popular boy from high school even after he got fat and immediately Snapchatted my friend about it afterward."

We parted ways, with me feeling infinitely better hearing that I wasn't alone in my insecurities. In my cab home that night, I opened up Tinder — undeterred from my thirst trap at large — where lo and behold, because the universe is an actual fucking joke: I came across Hometown Bumble Bro's Tinder profile.

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